Privacy policy

The NSW Ombudsman is subject to the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998 and the Health Records and Information Privacy Act 2002.

We will only record your email address if you send us an email through the links provided on the site. We will not use your email address for any mailing list or any other contact register.

If your email is a complaint or you make a complaint using our online portal, please refer to the information on this website under How to make a complaint to find out how we deal with any issues raised, your email address, and any other personal information you give us when making a complaint.

The portal can be used to make a complaint about a NSW Government agency that we oversight, a NSW local council or a NSW Government funded community service provider that we oversight. 

When lodging a complaint, you may choose to register an account on the portal, or to continue as a guest.

• If you register an account, you may save draft complaints to be updated and submitted later, track your complaint’s progress, update your details, upload further documents, or withdraw the complaint at any time.
• If you proceed as a guest, you must create and submit your complaint in a single session. It is not possible to save and then later resume your complaint. Draft complaints that have not been submitted by guest users will be deleted after 100 days unless you contact us again during that time about your unsubmitted complaint.

The information we collect from you:

• will be used for the purposes of handling your complaint.
• may also be used for the purposes of informing the work we do as part of our oversight functions. ¹
• The information we collect from you may also be used to help us understand why forms aren’t submitted so that we can improve our services.

For more information, please see our Privacy and Information Management Plan.

The NSW Ombudsman does not have any responsibility for the privacy policies or practices of any third-party site linked to our website.

Our website is passive and does not record any information about a machine accessing our website. We cannot identify or trace who visits our site.

¹ Under the Ombudsman Act 1974, the Community Services (Complaints, Reviews and Monitoring) Act 1993, the Public Interest Disclosures Act 2022 or the Mandatory Disease Testing Act 2021.